Measuring Time Preferences

NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES MEASURING TIME PREFERENCES Jonathan D. Cohen Keith Marzilli Ericson David Laibson John Myles White Working Paper 22455 http://www.nber.org/papers/w22455 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 July 2016 We thank Steven Durlauf and five anonymous referees at the Journal of Economic Literature for thoughtful comments. We thank Layne Kirshon, Omeed Maghzian, Lea Nagel, and Kartik Vira for outstanding research assistance. We acknowledge financial support from the National Institutes of Health (NIA R01AG021650 and P01AG005842) and the Pershing Square Fund for Research in the Foundations of Human Behavior. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer- reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2016 by Jonathan D. Cohen, Keith Marzilli Ericson, David Laibson, and John Myles White. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. Measuring Time Preferences Jonathan D. Cohen, Keith Marzilli Ericson, David Laibson, and John Myles White NBER Working Paper No. 22455 July 2016, Revised February 2019 JEL No. D03,D9 ABSTRACT We review research that measures time preferences—i.e., preferences over intertemporal tradeoffs. We distinguish between studies using financial flows, which we call “money earlier or later” (MEL) decisions and studies that use time-dated consumption/effort. Under different structural models, we show how to translate what MEL experiments directly measure (required rates of return for financial flows) into a discount function over utils. We summarize empirical regularities found in MEL studies and the predictive power of those studies. We explain why MEL choices are driven in part by some factors that are distinct from underlying time preferences. Jonathan D. Cohen David Laibson Green Hall Department of Economics Princeton University Littauer M-12 Princeton, NJ 08544 Harvard University jdc@princeton.edu Cambridge, MA 02138 and NBER Keith Marzilli Ericson dlaibson@gmail.com Boston University Questrom School of Business 595 Commonwealth Avenue John Myles White Boston, MA 02215 Green Hall and NBER Princeton University kericson@bu.edu Princeton, NJ 08540 jmw@johnmyleswhite.com Measuring Time Preferences 1. Introduction In the early 1980s, almost all economists embraced a single model of intertemporal choice: the classical discounted utility model (Samuelson 1937), which features time-separable utility flows and exponential discounting. In this parsimonious framework, utils delayed τ periods from the present are given weight δτ, where δ is the discount factor. During the 1980’s, researchers began conducting experiments that were designed to test the classical discounted utility model. Since it is hard to give subjects “utils”, experimenters gave them what was considered to be the next best thing: money. For example, subjects would choose between X dollars at an early date or Y dollars at a later date. We call these experiments, which offer participants time-dated monetary payments, Money Earlier or Later (MEL) experiments. Under the assumption that promised time-dated payments and time-dated utils are interchangeable—an assumption that we will critically examine—MEL experiments generate numerous empirical regularities that contradict the standard discounted utility model. These anomalies, which are discussed below (section 5), include the magnitude effect, diminishing impatience, sub-additive discounting, and many others. As this apparently anomalous experimental evidence accumulated, researchers began to propose theoretical fixes. Several theories were proposed that could account for some of the anomalous data emerging from MEL studies. These included hyperbolic discounting (Strotz 1955; Ainslie 1975, 1992, 2001, 2012; Loewenstein and Prelec 1992), present-biased preferences (Laibson 1997; O’Donoghue and Rabin 1999a, 1999b), temptation-based preferences (Gul and Pesendorfer 2001), dual-self preferences (Metcalfe and Mischel 1999; Thaler and Shefrin 1981; Fudenberg and Levine 2006; Loewenstein and O’Donoghue 2004), and psychometric distortions such as log time perceptions (Read 2001 originates this idea which is expanded upon by Zauberman et al. 2009). The literature has continued to evolve, growing more complicated as the number of theories has mushroomed. Some observers have argued that no existing framework can explain the rich set of anomalies that have emerged from the MEL experimental paradigm (Frederick, Loewenstein and O’Donoghue, 2002). In recent years, a new set of challenges has arisen. Researchers have begun to question the MEL methodology itself. This experimental paradigm can be motivated by assuming that a monetary payment at date t generates a dollar-equivalent incremental consumption event at time t (and the corresponding utility flow at time t). This assumption is inconsistent both with the empirical evidence and with standard economic theory. Only perfectly liquidity-constrained consumers or perfectly myopic consumers would instantly consume every payment they receive, with zero intertemporal smoothing. Page 2 Measuring Time Preferences Alternatively, the MEL paradigm can be motivated by assuming that income (or financial flows) is the appropriate fundamental argument of the utility function. This assumption is made occasionally in the economics literature, and is a coherent alternative to the reigning consumption-based model of utility. Nevertheless, an income-based utility function is not usually used in the economics literature. Indeed, the consumption literature starts by assuming that consumption is the argument of the utility function and that consumption is therefore being smoothed over the lifecycle (i.e., consumption is not equal to income) because the utility function is concave (e.g., see Friedman 1957; Modigliani and Brumberg 1954; and Hall 1978). Because the myopic consumption model (consumption = income) is empirically contradicted and because most economists believe that consumption is the proper argument of the utility function, the MEL methodology itself has become a target of criticism. In light of these criticisms, it has become less clear what the MEL methodology is measuring. The literature is now divided on many dimensions, including both the theoretical foundations of intertemporal preferences and the empirical methods that we should use to measure intertemporal preferences. On the theory side, there is a division between models that assume dynamic inconsistency (often adopted by behavioral economists) and models that assume dynamically consistent preferences.1 On the empirical side, there is a division between recent work critical of the MEL framework (Chabris et al. 2008; Epper, Fehr-Duda, and Bruhin 2011; Augenblick, Niederle, and Sprenger 2015; Ericson et al. 2015), and research that uses the assumption that choices in MEL experiments are equivalent to choices over time-dated utility flows (for instance, much of the literature reviewed in Frederick, Loewenstein and O’Donoghue 2002; Andersen et al. 2008; Benhabib, Bisin and Schotter 2010; Halevy 2014, 2015). Because of its methodological simplicity, the MEL framework remains the most widely used paradigm for estimating time preferences. In this review, we take the reader through this developing literature, pointing out the explicit and implicit assumptions that researchers have made along the way and the problems with those assumptions. We offer tips on how researchers should navigate the shoals of the time preferences literature: what are the pros and cons of the different theories and the different empirical methods that are now available? The bad news is that the literature is in discord, without a shared theoretical framework or a broadly accepted empirical methodology. The good news is that conceptual discord is invigorating the intertemporal choice literature and opening the way for new ideas that we hope will resolve the multiple conceptual and methodological contradictions that have emerged. 1 Preferences are dynamically consistent iff all the state-contingent preferences held at time t agree with the state- contingent preferences held at time t+τ for all values of t and τ. Page 3 Measuring Time Preferences Despite this discord, most of the empirical literature relies on a common method: MEL. In Figure 1, we demonstrate this by providing an empirical snapshot of the empirical side of the discounting literature. Figure 1 summarizes the characteristics of empirical studies identified using Google Scholar to search for papers reporting measurements of time preferences (see our appendix for details, including keywords used and a complete list of the papers identified). While the results of such a search are crude—we undoubtedly missed some relevant papers—they provide a rough-and-ready guide to the overall state of the literature. MEL is a common methodology, with column 2 showing that more than 60% of papers use it. Most papers examine behavior in the lab, but a substantial minority examines behavior in the field (column 3). Columns 4 and 5 describe the type of individuals being studied. While students still form an important study population, a majority of

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